>“Their loss is a big deal,” says retired National Hurricane Center branch chief James Franklin, who oversaw all NHC hurricane forecasters until his retirement in 2017. “Without this imagery, there will be increased risk of a ‘sunrise surprise,’ the realization from first-light images that a system had become much better organized overnight, but it wasn’t recognized because structural details are so hard to discern from [infrared satellite].”

>Microwave data are also used to help “fix” or position the center of storms, a task not always easily or accurately accomplished using visible or enhanced satellite pictures. As the butterfly effect demonstrates, small errors in the initial positioning of a storm can lead to outsized forecast errors in four or five days.

>“For weaker systems, [it’s] increased initial position error (in the tens of miles) that will cascade into poorer track forecasts,” warns Franklin.

>Microwave data such as those from the DoD Special Sensor Microwave Imager Sounder are essential to hurricane forecasts, not a nice-to-have. They’re used in a variety of critical applications, including estimating hurricane intensity through AI-driven neural networks like the Deep Multispectral INtensity of TCs estimator or DMINT. In the absence of hurricane hunters, DMINT has been shown to be one of the most crucial tools in a hurricane forecaster’s arsenal for estimating storm intensity, largely because of the microwave data it utilizes.

>Though other microwave data will still be available to forecasters, the DoD weather satellites comprise half of all microwave instruments, which means data availability will be sliced in half, greatly increasing the odds of missing rapid intensification episodes, underestimating intensity, or misplacing the storm and degrading forecast accuracy.

Back | Go to board

Board:

/news/

Thread:

Trump Unveils Plan to Kill His Voters This Hurricane Season